Thousands of Chinese communist officials have been panicked into a fire sale of their illicit properties and billions of pounds have been smuggled overseas as the country's new leaders intensify a campaign to root out corruption.

Luxurious properties are being dumped on the market in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou for anyone able to pay in cash as officials try to cover their tracks. A report by the party's anti-corruption unit, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said "a wave of luxury home sales began last November and has accelerated since December".

It said the volume of deals had intensified by "a hundred times" after Xi Jinping, the incoming Chinese president, warned that corruption could kill the party and put one of the country's most vigorous and resolute politicians, Wang Qishan, in charge of stamping out graft.

Fu Zongmo, an estate agent in Sanya, Hainan, said his colleagues had sold two houses recently for government officials. In recent years, the tropical beaches and golf courses of Sanya have attracted plenty of speculators but recently the market has stalled.

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"They never register the houses in their own names and they use a string of agents to do the deals," said Mr Fu. He said one company had bribed an official by buying him a property at the Mountain Water International Complex. "The property was put in the name of the official's relative. After six months, it was sold for two million yuan ($302,000), around the same amount it cost. Then the official could cash out.

"The officials often use a special mobile number and when the deal closes they invite us for dinner to end the relationship. Then they throw away the number so we cannot contact them," he added.

The CDIC report, which was obtained by the Economic Observer newspaper, suggested that nearly 10,000 luxurious homes had been sold by officials in Guangzhou and Shanghai last year. It also claimed that $US 1 trillion, equivalent to 40 per cent of Britain's annual gross domestic product, had been smuggled out of China illegally in 2012. Economists and experts cast doubt on the figure, but said the flow of money was dramatic. Li Chengyan, a professor at Peking University, suggested that about 10,000 officials had absconded from China with as much as pounds $US100 billion.

Marco Pearman-Parish at Corporation China, a company in Beijing that helps clients find properties abroad, said there had been a strong rise in clients looking for homes in the Cayman Islands. "In Beijing, half our clients are government officials," he said. "Nine out of 10 claim to be businessmen, but it emerges over the course of the deal that they have government jobs."

The CDIC said 1,100 government officials had fled China during last year's national holidays in October and that 714 had been successful in getting away. In the United States, the National Association of Realtors said properties worth more than $US7 billion had been bought by Chinese in the US last year. Some high-end homes were now built for rich Chinese, with ponds for koi carp and a second kitchen for pungent cooking.

Jiang Ming'an, a professor at Peking University Law School and an anti-corruption adviser, said: "The government has been setting up a housing registration system and that may have scared some of the officials with too many houses. People will not take to the streets now because the economy is good. But when it slows down in the future, as the old saying goes, the fire cannot be covered with paper forever."